In the commercial banking industry, financial institutions often issue and sell travelers cheques to customers for their use as demand instruments or as orders for the payment of money throughout the world at participating merchants and financial institutions, including affiliates of the issuing bank. For example, MasterCard International Incorporated ("MasterCard") and its subsidiary operate a cooperative travelers cheque system on behalf of member banks whereby such banks may issue MasterCard travelers cheques to their own individual customers for use by these customers in making retail purchases throughout the United States and the world. Member banks also accept for deposit from their merchant customers the travelers cheques which are passed during a purchase transaction. MasterCard provides for the settlement of accounts between a bank that accepts a travelers cheque for deposit (the Acquiring bank) when the travelers cheque used for the purchase was issued by another bank (the Issuing bank).
In connection with the issuance and use of travelers cheques, a customer of a member bank typically purchases either a packet of travelers cheques or loose travelers cheques from that bank, which cheques are taken out of inventory by a teller and manually recorded by that teller for security purposes and for updating the bank's inventory. Banks also are called upon to pay customers cash upon the return of unused cheques ("encashment") and upon claims of lost or stolen cheques. Typically, prior to settlement of the refund for lost or stolen cheques, a security or authorization check is made by the bank whereby a host or central computer is consulted to verify that the lost or stolen claim is genuine.
Several different transaction devices are known and numerous techniques are used in the travelers cheque industry for performing a range of related tasks including (1) capturing sales data such as the number and monetary amount of travelers cheques sold; (2) transmitting such data to central locations for inventory update and control; (3) providing settlement data to central locations for settlement purposes; (4) authorizing encashment, i.e., return of unused verified travelers cheques; and (5) providing refunds upon verification of genuinely lost or stolen cheques. No one transaction travelers cheque terminal has included all of these functions in a dedicated communications and draft read and capture device as provided in the present invention.
Prior systems include magnetic and optical scanners which allow for integration at the teller or workstation level through standard communications interfaces. These devices do not include memory features which retain draft capture, encashment and refund information for later submission to a remote host; the data collected in these systems are sent immediately to a remote computer at the time the data is read by the scanner. Non-scanning systems also exist which include computer software packages for managing inventory, sales and refund requests of travelers cheques in foreign and domestic currencies.
Significantly, no terminal device presently includes an optical character recognition reader (OCR) and supports the following functions:
Travelers cheque sales by packet (PAF)
Loose travelers cheque sales
Encashment of travelers cheques
Refund of travelers cheques
Local review of captured data
Cancellation of PAF or loose cheque sales
Accordingly, it is an objective of the present invention to provide a new and improved terminal for reading and capturing data from a travelers cheque for purposes of performing these various functions.